Thu March 21, 2013

Sexual Violence Victims Say Military Justice System Is 'Broken'

Myla Haider (shown at a press conference in Washington, D.C., in 2011) says she initially decided not to report that she'd been raped because she'd "never met one victim who was able to report the crime and still retain their military career."

Lawyer Susan Burke (shown here at a press conference in Abu Dhabi in 2010) has sued the Pentagon on behalf of multiple plaintiffs in rape cases, including Haider. Burke says the military justice system needs to change.

AFP/Getty Images

Myla Haider took a roundabout route to becoming an agent in the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, or CID. Wars kept interrupting her training.

"My commander wanted to take me to Iraq as the intelligence analyst for the battalion, so I gave up my seat in CID school," Haider says.

She speaks in a steady, "just the facts ma'am" tone. Once a cop always a cop, the 37-year-old says.

Her commander from the 101st Airborne, retired Lt. Col. Marty Herbert, describes Haider as a sharp, even-keeled analyst, standing out in a battalion of hundreds. Haider went with the 101st to Kandahar in 2002, and then to Iraq in 2003.

"On the invasion, it was me and three other guys living in the vehicle for days at a time," she says.

If you wanted to bathe, you could use one of the four precious bottles of water in the daily ration, Haider recalls.

"There was no privacy; it was just sand as far as you can see," she says. "I didn't change clothes; we were in chemical suits for two weeks straight."

Paradoxically, it was a good time in her life. Under fire, Haider says, those soldiers from the 101st became her brothers. She never felt sidelined because of her gender, never felt the least bit threatened living among the men. In the downtime there was plenty of joking around — they'd peg each other with a Nerf football. In such close quarters, there were hardly any secrets.

Except Haider was carrying a heavy one.

Before she ever went to war, during CID training, Haider was raped. With some experience already with the military's attitude toward rape, she decided not to report the attack.

"I've never met one victim who was able to report the crime and still retain their military career," she says. "Not one."

Haider made that decision and was at peace with it; she left that one terrible incident in the past. In many ways the camaraderie with male soldiers in the 101st, forged in Iraq and Afghanistan, helped her heal. Soldiers there treated her with respect and helped her remember not all men, not all soldiers, are sexual predators.

But the past wouldn't stay buried. A few years later, after she'd become a CID agent, Haider got a phone call from an officer who was investigating a possible serial rapist — the soldier who raped her.

It was a moral dilemma, with an obvious course.

"All of the other women who were involved in the case had been attacked after I was attacked," Haider says. "So I thought the only right thing for me to do was to be involved."

A Reluctance To Report Attacks

Her reluctance to report the rape initially is one that victims' advocates understand too well.

"It's a very telling story about a broken system," says Susan Burke, an attorney who has sued the Pentagon on behalf of many rape plaintiffs, including Haider.

The Department of Defense estimates there are about 19,000 sexual assaults in the military per year. But according to the latest Pentagon statistics, only 1,108 troops filed for an investigation during the most recent yearly reporting period. In that same period, 575 cases were processed — and of those, just 96 went to court-martial.

"They were only willing to go forward on a small fraction, and then of those, only a portion, only 96 of them, get court-martialed," Burke says.

Then — at court-martial — the officer who convened the trial can change the charge, reduce the sentence, or even overturn the verdict.

That's what happened last month in a case at the U.S. Air Base in Aviano, Italy. A military jury had convicted an officer of sexually assaulting a houseguest while she was asleep. The general presiding over the case — the "convening authority," in military-speak — threw out the verdict, without explanation.

The Aviano case spurred a Senate subcommittee hearing last week, where senators grilled the Judge Advocate General from each of the services about the continuing issue of rape in the military.

"Sexual assault has no place in my Army, and no place in my military," he said at the same Senate hearing. "It is an affront to the values that we defend, and it erodes the cohesion that our units demand."

Patton says a highly critical documentary film called The Invisible War is now part of the military's curriculum on sexual assault. He says he watched the film with his grown daughters and was struck by the scope of the problem.

Victim Keeps Paying A Price

But that film features lawyer Susan Burke and former CID agent Myla Haider, who both argue that trained military police and lawyers should oversee rape investigations, not "convening authorities" who may have no legal training and are within the chain of command where the assault took place.

Until that happens, the victim will keep paying the price, says Haider. That's what happened in her case.

"When I reported it, it was a very small part of my life. But by making that choice, my reporting of it took over my life, ruined my career and wound up, ultimately, getting me kicked out of the Army," she says.

Haider and several other plaintiffs testified, but in the end, the charges were reduced, and the perpetrator avoided going into a registry of sex offenders.

In a cruel twist, Haider was called out to investigate a rape the same night she got the phone call that opened her own case. Later, when she testified in that case as a CID agent, she realized her career was done.

"While I was testifying, the defense attorney said, 'Isn't it true that you're a rape victim yourself?' And I was appalled, because as an investigator, it had nothing to do with the case," she says.

From that point on, colleagues at CID treated her differently. For years she'd heard CID agents doubt the stories of rape victims, and now they doubted her work. She says that after years of praise from commanders, she got reprimands. Haider had endured war. She'd endured rape. It was reporting the crime that drove her out of the Army, after nearly a decade of service.

She completed an M.A. in counseling in 2009 and has been helping rape survivors — a new career, a good one. But, she says, not the one she chose.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

You may have heard about a U.S. Air Force pilot who was convicted of sexual assault last November. He was sentenced to be discharged from the service and spend a year in jail. Then last month, an Air Force general overturned that verdict.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Members of Congress demanded an explanation, and here is the explanation they got. Under the Uniform Military Code of Justice, a general's decision to overturn a court-martial verdict cannot be challenged. That's part of the same legal system that gets convictions in fewer than 10 percent of rape cases. Much more often, the victims wind up paying a price in damage to their careers.

MONTAGNE: NPR's Quil Lawrence has been reporting this week on women combat veterans. Today, the story of one woman who knows the process from the inside.

QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Myla Haider took a roundabout route to becoming an agent in the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, CID. War kept interrupting her training.

MYLA HAIDER: My commander wanted to take me to Iraq as the intelligence analyst for the battalion, so I gave up my seat in CID school.

LAWRENCE: Haider eventually became an agent. It shows in her steady, just-the-facts-ma'am tone. Once a cop, always a cop, she says. Her commander from the 101st Airborne told us her even-keeled competence made her stand out in a battalion of hundreds. Haider went with the 101st to Kandahar in 2002, and then to Iraq in 2003.

HAIDER: On the invasion, it was me and three other guys living in a vehicle for days at a time.

LAWRENCE: Haider says under fire, those soldiers from the 101st became her brothers.

HAIDER: There was no privacy; it was just sand as far as you could see. I mean, I didn't change clothes because we were in chemical suits for two weeks straight.

LAWRENCE: She never felt sidelined by her gender, never felt the least bit threatened living among the men. There was no privacy, no secrets - except Haider was carrying one. Before she ever deployed, during CID training, she had been raped.

SUSAN BURKE: Myla Haider is a very, very strong woman.

LAWRENCE: Susan Burke is an attorney who has sued the Pentagon on behalf of many rape plaintiffs, including Haider.

BURKE: What happened next, I think, is very revealing about the reality of military service. Myla, a trained investigator, knowledgeable about the way the Army treated rape victims - she decided not to report the rape because she did not believe she would get justice.

HAIDER: I have never met one victim who was able to report the crime and still retain their military career. Not one. I have never met one person who has reported a sexual assault offense, and kept their career.

LAWRENCE: The thing is, she was OK with her decision. Haider says she left that one, terrible incident in the past. In many ways, the camaraderie forged in Iraq and Afghanistan helped her heal; helped her convince herself that not all men, not all soldiers, are sexual predators. But the past wouldn't stay buried. Haider's lawyer, Susan Burke.

BURKE: A couple years later, the same predator - has raped several other law enforcement women.

HAIDER: I was contacted by an investigator who was investigating the offender as a serial rapist.

BURKE: She thought, all right, they'll have to take it seriously. You've got all these - multiple rapes. And so she reported it.

HAIDER: All of the women who were involved in the case had been attacked after I had been attacked. So I felt that the only right thing for me to do was to be involved.

BURKE: The man did not get convicted. He did not get convicted, despite the fact that he had raped multiple women in law enforcement. This is a very telling story about a broken system.

LAWRENCE: A broken system. Burke pulls up the latest numbers from the Department of Defense, on her laptop...

BURKE: It's still loading here.

LAWRENCE: ...to explain what she means. Three numbers tell the story: 19,000 - that's the estimated number of sexual assaults in the military; 575 - that's the number of cases processed in 2011, dismissed or moved to the next stage; finally, 96 - the number of those that go to court-martial.

BURKE: They were only willing to go forward on a small fraction. And then of those, only a portion - only 96 of them - get court-martialed.

LAWRENCE: Then, at a court-martial, the officer who convened the trial can change the charge, reduce the sentence, or even overturn the verdict. That's what happened last month in a case at the U.S. Air Base in Aviano, Italy. A military jury had convicted an officer of sexually assaulting a houseguest while she was asleep. The general presiding over the Aviano case threw out the verdict without explanation.

SEN. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND: Let's talk about the Aviano case.

LAWRENCE: That's Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York. She questioned the Air Force judge advocate general, Richard Harding, last week.

GILLIBRAND: Do you think justice was done in that case?

RICHARD HARDING: I think that the convening authority reviewed the facts and made an independent determination, and he did so with integrity.

LAWRENCE: So, that's the debate now. Should one officer - the convening authority - have the power to switch a jury verdict? Victims' advocates say no, but there's resistance. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who's also a lawyer in the Air Force Reserve, says Aviano is an extremely rare case - and the system shouldn't change.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: We have generally held the view that the one person that has the power to determine good order and discipline, is the military commander.

LAWRENCE: The secretary of defense is reviewing the Aviano case. The Pentagon is making some changes. A pilot program gives legal counsel to victims. Major Gen. Gary Patton leads the Pentagon's efforts on sexual assault.

MAJ. GEN. GARY PATTON: Sexual assault has no place in my Army, and no place in my military. It is an affront to the values that we defend, and it erodes the cohesion that our units demand.

LAWRENCE: Patton says a highly critical documentary film, called "The Invisible War," is now part of the military's curriculum on sexual assault. That film features lawyer Susan Burke and former CID agent Myla Haider. They both insist that military police and lawyers, not commanding officer, should oversee rape investigations. Until that happens, Myla Haider says, the victim pays the price.

HAIDER: That's essentially what happened when I reported it. It was a very small part of my life, but by making that choice - my reporting of it took over my life, ruined my career and wound up, ultimately, getting me kicked out of the Army.

LAWRENCE: The defendant in her case was charged with a lesser offense, and stayed in the service. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: The defendant in Haider's case was discharged from the military. Also, the lesser charges he was convicted of related to other plaintiffs in the case, not to Haider.] As for Haider, the next time she was investigating a rape case for CID, she realized her career was done.

HAIDER: While I was testifying, the defense attorney asked me, isn't it true that you're a rape victim yourself? And I was appalled because as an investigator, that had nothing to do with my investigation of the crime.

LAWRENCE: From that point on, colleagues at CID treated her differently. For years, she had heard CID agents doubt the stories of rape victims and now, they doubted her work. Her whole career, she'd gotten praise from commanders; now, she got reprimands. Haider had endured war. She'd endured rape. It was reporting the crime that drove her out of the Army. She's now getting a degree in counseling and has been helping rape survivors - a new career, a good one. But, she says, not the one she chose.

Quil Lawrence, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

INSKEEP: Tomorrow in our series, women and the masculine world of the military. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.